Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Body Matters, 21st AHRA International Conference, Norwich, İngiltere, 21 - 23 Kasım 2024, ss.33, (Özet Bildiri)
The Aegean Sea is a significant body of water witnessing the displacement, misplacement, and replacement of humans and nonhumans. Beyond being a physical body that takes action, it is also a political body controlling their relations within and across it. The archipelagic condition of its islands forms an assemblage shaped by border regimes and disputes over nautical claims between Greece and Turkiye. This critical body of water requires the notion of "body" to be elaborated and re-materialized in the context of architectural humanities—an untraceable notion of motion. Acting as both witness and ally, it is investigated through formal-informal, human-nonhuman, visible-invisible ephemeral substantiations.
Reconsidering the notion of the body through the Aegean Sea, the study investigates a new materialism of thought that transcends architecture into cross-disciplinary manifestations. It presupposes a network of relations with non-fixed entities, emerging unpredictably around socio-political and cultural events, denying descriptive claims over its natural materiality and function, and cutting across natural and political borders. The sea acts as a tool of intervention in events like population exchanges and migration crises, highlighting its role in deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The study traces the misplacement of nonhuman bodies via ballast water in ships (Fig. 1), stored in ballast tanks when not carrying cargo, stabilizing movement (Fig. 2) while introducing alien species, threatening native marine life.
Having a thick repository of events and conflicts, the Aegean Sea provides a new discussion ground for architectural humanities through the displacement and replacement of human agencies, from the population exchange after the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 to the present-day migration and refugee crisis. Aiming to expand the materiality and mattering of the water body, this research questions how it can be framed in architectural discourse as multiple forms of care and layers of emplotment. By concealing acts of violence while revealing displaced bodies ashore, the Aegean Sea offers a new interpretation of post-structuralist thought, positioning architecture as an apparatus of care.